Book Excerpt

White House Civil War

Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore on the campaign trail in New Jersey, July 1992. Mark Peterson/Corbis.

Promised real power as Bill Clinton's vice president, Al Gore found he had a rival for that role: the First Lady. And when Hillary decided to run for the Senate, a tense competition got ugly. In an excerpt from her new book about the Clinton White House years, the author reveals how conflicting agendas—the triangle of a scandal-ridden lame-duck president, the wife he'd betrayed, and his designated successor—sapped Gore's 2000 campaign as the bond between two couples dissolved into distrust, anger, and resentment.

During the 1992 campaign, Bill and Hillary Clinton took several successful bus trips with vice-presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, where they bonded to such an extent that Tipper called Hillary her "long-lost sister." "If there is a subject under the sun that we haven't discussed, I don't know what it might be," said Al. So it seemed fitting that the four of them again boarded a bus three days before Bill Clinton's inauguration, this time for a 120-mile ride from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Washington, re-enacting the trip that Thomas Jefferson had made in 1801.

After conducting an interview with Bill and Hillary, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw lingered while the two couples sat around a table in the kitchenette in the front of the bus. "It struck me like a college-dorm bull session rather than an incoming administration," Brokaw recalled. "Hillary was not leading, but she was like a junior partner. It was Gore to Bill Clinton, and Hillary was gracefully part of the conversation."

Eight days later, Bill appointed Hillary head of the health-care task force, which was charged with developing a plan to re-structure the health-insurance system. The move took nearly all his top officials by surprise, including Al Gore. Bill had invested Gore with considerable responsibility, but his failure to confide in his vice president was a telling sign of the real pecking order.

Bill and Hillary's joint decision-making at the beginning of his presidency was as overt as it would ever be in the White House. "He would say, 'Hillary thinks this. What do you think?'" said White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum. "They really were a partnership. She was the absolutely necessary person he had to have to bounce things up against, and he was that for her. I sensed a tremendous need for each other. They didn't have to see each other, but they would talk continually every day." In deference to her continuing role as Bill's "closer," staff members called Hillary "the Supreme Court." "We would always say, 'Has the Supreme Court been consulted?'" recalled Dee Dee Myers, the president's press secretary for two years, now a V.F. contributing editor. Whenever Bill said, "Let me think about it," aides knew he intended to call Hillary.

Gore was the one most affected by Bill's reliance on his wife. It was a given in the White House, as Chief of Staff Mack McLarty said, that everyone would "just have to get used to" the fact that Hillary, along with Bill and Gore, had to "sign off on big decisions." But having what Clinton domestic-policy adviser Bruce Reed called "three forces to be reckoned with" added yet another layer of perplexity and rivalry to the West Wing, where advisers and Cabinet officers knew they could lobby either the First Lady or the vice president to reverse decisions by the president. David Gergen, counselor to the president in 1993 and 1994, called the "three-headed system" a "rolling disaster."

The early conventional wisdom about the relationship between the president and vice president shifted from adoring descriptions of generational bonding to the prevailing media view that Gore's influence would "inevitably diminish" now that his "Dudley Do-Right" image was no longer necessary to take the curse off "Slick Willie." An account in The New York Times Magazine shortly before the inauguration set out the new interpretation, noting that "Al Gore hasn't yet realized there is going to be a co-presidency but he's not going to be part of the co," and that, according to the Clintons' close friend and adviser Susan Thomases, Gore "would have to adjust to a smaller role." The article came out of the blue, and the Gore camp detected the veiled handiwork of Hillary in its slant. It was an open secret that some of Hillary's advisers, Thomases in particular, nurtured dreams that Hillary, not Gore, would follow Bill in the presidency. "There are a great many people talking very seriously about her succeeding him," Betsey Wright, Bill's chief of staff in Arkansas, admitted during her former boss's first year as president.

"Of course there were tensions," said one of the Clintons' longtime friends, who recalled private meetings in which Hillary encouraged her husband to discount Gore's advice by saying, "Bill, you are president. This is your administration." The threesome "at times had the feeling of a brother and sister trying to win the affection not of the father but of another, more powerful older brother," said this friend. Hillary had an obvious advantage over Gore, because she and Bill had been on the same wavelength for so long that they communicated almost by telepathy. But Gore operated under the assumption that Bill took Hillary's advice only when she claimed an issue as her own, and only when Bill would suffer emotional consequences if he ignored her.

The Clintons resented the Gores because they were products of Washington's prestigious private schools and its social network, on the A-list for elite Georgetown gatherings such as the annual New Year's Eve party hosted by former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn. A friend of the Clintons' noted in a journal that Hillary once said with some bitterness, "Gore gets credit because he's a Washington insider and can play the game. Gore is not 'from someplace called Arkansas.'"

Hillary Rising

While Hillary held unique sway with Bill, he nevertheless had a close and effective professional relationship with his vice president. "Gore had more of an ability to influence the president than was acknowledged," said a Clinton adviser. Before taking office, the two men signed a written agreement setting out Gore's responsibilities for environmental, foreign-affairs, national-security, science, and communications policies, as well as a general advisory role. Bill also committed to a private lunch with Gore every Thursday. Gore was particularly insistent on the lunches, held in the small dining room off the Oval Office, where he would arrive each week with a stack of material to cover. Gore knew "if the relationship was not nurtured, it would become vulnerable," said one top White House official.

Bill's panoramic but haphazard intelligence often benefited from Gore's more rigorous and linear thinking. In some respects, Gore's cast of mind was similar to Hillary's in his quest for synthesis, his empirical thought processes, and his effectiveness in meetings, prompting one staff member to liken him to a "piece of artillery." But Gore and Hillary had dissimilar personalities. Most obviously, Gore had an ironic sensibility and appreciation for the absurd that both Bill and Hillary lacked. Asked how his routine had changed when he was forced to use crutches after injuring his Achilles tendon, he deadpanned, "It takes me twice as long to walk Socks," the Clintons' cat.

Bill and Tipper, who shared the same birthday, were more outgoing than Al and Hillary. As a foursome, they got together for bowling and movies at the White House, dinners and concerts, and nights at Camp David. Tipper quietly went out of her way to help Hillary with suggestions about doctors, dentists, and other domestic matters. She introduced her to her friend Dana Buchman, a designer from Memphis, and immediately stopped wearing Buchman's clothes because Hillary wanted those styles to be "her look." When Hillary was upset over press coverage, Tipper would invite her to lunch at the vice-presidential mansion to commiserate. Tipper had a master's degree in psychology, and she frequently appeared at Hillary's side to discuss mental-health issues. Her presence, The Washington Post noted, "reinforces Hillary as a caring person."

Yet Hillary always had an undercurrent of competition with Al Gore that burst into the open from time to time. One day, when Gore and his team presented their plans for improving government efficiency, Bill asked so many questions that the meeting ran a half-hour too long. As a result, Bill was late for a session in the White House Residence with Hillary and her health-care advisers. Feeling snubbed, Hillary lectured her husband on the importance of health care. Bill "retreated a bit," recalled a participant. "It took five minutes to get through that situation.… She was not pleased."

The turning point in Hillary's political life came on November 6, 1998, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said he would not run for a fifth term. New York congressman Charles Rangel, who had already been pushing Hillary to enter the race, called that evening and said, "I sure hope you'll consider running, because I think you could win." Bill later wrote that he thought it "sounded like a pretty good idea," although Hillary said she told Rangel that she was "honored" but "not interested" and that she considered the idea "absurd." Yet the same day, Mandy Grunwald, a key adviser to Hillary, called the Moynihans to assess their reaction to a Senate bid by Hillary. They both thought it was a bad idea, because she didn't know the state and hadn't shown any interest in its issues or needs.

The Moynihan seat had in fact been on the Clintons' radar for months. Shortly after the midterm election, Hillary and her longtime adviser Harold Ickes signaled that interest by inviting a group of friends to have dinner and talk about her prospects. "It was a very pragmatic political discussion," recalled Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala. "I told her not to run, that she was an outsider, had never lived in New York. We talked about the Bobby Kennedy thing, and her response was that she was looking at the polls. She said that, based on Kennedy's experience [winning a Senate seat as a newcomer to the state in 1964, after he had served as attorney general for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson], New Yorkers were welcoming." By Bill's account, Hillary made up her mind only days after Moynihan announced his retirement. Once she had spent time "looking around and talking to people," she said, "Okay, I want to do it. So here we go."

In his practical and optimistic way, Bill saw the Senate candidacy as a prize for Hillary, a lifeline for him, and a salve for their marriage after her humiliation over his sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which had been sensationally revealed the previous January. He was impeached in December 1998 by the Republican-controlled House, for lying to a grand jury about Lewinsky and obstructing an investigation by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr into the affair. Even before Bill's lawyers succeeded in blocking his conviction by the Senate on February 12, he was learning to assume an unaccustomed secondary role and to serve Hillary as directly as she had served him for so long—in some sense, the ultimate penance for his habitual womanizing.

"It looks to me like it is highly likely that I will increasingly be known as the person who comes with Hillary to New York," he told a group of well-heeled donors at Le Cirque in Manhattan on February 2, 1999, adding that he was "getting ready for my next life. I'm going to be the comic that closes the show—my stand-up life."

Bill had his own purposes behind his slightly uneasy jocularity. "For Bill Clinton, there was no way for his popularity to be tested," said one of Hillary's advisers. "She would carry the burden of his behavior. Politicians are always looking for signs that they have been forgiven—or at least that the public has gone past it. She was a surrogate for him on that." Madeleine Albright told a friend she was "impressed that Clinton was eager for Hillary to win the Senate race to recompense her for all she had to put up with and also a way for him to get back into campaigning." Bill's friend Tom Siebert, who was to raise money for Hillary, recognized that "the Senate race kept them in public life.… They grabbed the brass ring early in their lives, and running for elective office was in her DNA as much as his."

The prospect of teaming up in another race had a salutary effect on the Clintons' relationship by shifting their conversation to safe ground, away from the personal issues they had been grappling with in couples therapy. "Bill and I were talking again about matters other than the future of our relationship," Hillary later wrote. "We both began to relax. He was anxious to be helpful, and I welcomed his expertise." Susan Thomases observed, "She always had enormous respect and affection for him in the political context. He was always the strategist for himself and for her."

Rival Campaigns

Bill and Hillary's seventh year in the White House brought a dramatic shift in their relationship, with the center of gravity moving from his realm to hers. He was the lame duck, crippled by scandal, and she was the rising political star. Having saved his presidency by publicly standing by her man after the revelations about Lewinsky (first by proclaiming his innocence and then by attacking the enemies who sought to punish him), Hillary now had the upper hand, and his legacy was tied to her political fortunes. At the same time, Hillary's ascendancy had a significant impact on the presidential prospects of Al Gore, diverting attention and resources from his candidacy and adding to the growing tensions between the Gores and the Clintons over Bill's involvement with Lewinsky.

Gore had always been a determined campaigner and a skilled debater. But with his sometimes preachy delivery and stiff demeanor, he was not a natural on the stump like his boss. As the 2000 campaign drew closer, Bill seized on those apparent weaknesses in private critiques to influential Democratic supporters. When San Francisco investment banker Sandy Robertson was spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom after the state dinner for Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, on April 8, 1999, Bill invited him to the Treaty Room for a late-night conversation. The president propped his feet on a table and unloaded on Gore's political deficiencies. "He said he was trying to get Gore to be a better campaigner," Robertson recalled. "He was worried." Bill told Robertson, "I've been working with him to get him to loosen up."

A month later, Bill went public with his concerns in an interview that The New York Times put on its front page. Those misgivings, plus some early missteps by Gore, led to a Newsweek cover story in mid-May describing his presidential campaign as "off and stumbling." Gore was irritated by the president's intrusion, although he made light of it by telling Newsweek that Bill was one of many who had advised him to "loosen up." But when asked what role Bill would play in the 2000 campaign, Gore said, "He's got a full-time job being president—and he's doing it extremely well." Gore pointedly explained the strength of his own marriage by saying that he and Tipper shared the same values, which included being "faithful to one another and sharing life experiences."

Gore officially announced his candidacy for president on June 16, 1999, at the Smith County Courthouse, in Carthage, Tennessee, his family seat. Bill and Hillary were in Europe on a nine-day trip with their daughter, Chelsea. For Gore, the announcement provided an opportunity to redefine himself and to create some distance from Bill's personal problems. Since the Lewinsky scandal had broken, Gore had expressed his dismay about Bill's conduct to a small circle of advisers but had kept quiet publicly.

While polls showed the president's job-approval ratings holding at around 60 percent, questions about his character were taking a toll on Gore. A study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted in April found that "personal image problems and fallout from Clinton administration scandals are contributing to Al Gore's declining favorability ratings and his poor showing in early horse race polls." The study reported that Gore's favorability rating was 47 percent, down from 58 percent the previous December. Seventy-four percent of those polled were "tired of all the problems associated with the Clinton administration" —an alarming phenomenon that became known as "Clinton fatigue." Only 29 percent of Americans would have welcomed four more years of Bill Clinton, and 52 percent said they liked Gore better. In a hypothetical race between Gore and George W. Bush, the Texas governor led 54 percent to 41 percent, up several ticks since January.

At his announcement, Gore was surrounded by Tipper, his four children, and his mother. He repeatedly stressed the importance of family values and referred to the president only twice. Later that evening, Al and Tipper sat for an interview on ABC's 20/20 with Diane Sawyer. Asked about the Lewinsky affair, Gore said, "I thought it was awful. I thought it was inexcusable. But I made a commitment to serve this country as vice president." He added that "as a father" he felt the president's behavior "was terribly wrong, obviously." Seeking to differentiate his character from Bill's, he said, "It is our own lives we must master if we are to have the moral authority to guide our children." When Bill heard Gore's words, he erupted, "What the fuck is this about?" Moments later, in a call to Tennessee from his Paris hotel room, he praised Gore's announcement speech. "Nice job," said Bill.

As a sitting president, Bill was in a unique position to boost his vice president's candidacy by scheduling White House events to highlight his achievements. But in 1999 those resources were diverted from Gore to Hillary "in a big way," said one member of the Gore team. "The Clintons come first. That was their basic framework." From June through December, Bill and Hillary appeared at 20 events under the aegis of the White House, including a celebration of Hillary's 52nd birthday, where in typical style Bill larded his tribute with statistics on welfare, poverty, crime, and economic growth as he touted his wife as a "genuine visionary" needed by the Senate—the ultimate confluence of the personal and political. During the same period, Gore was featured only at a White House Conference on Mental Health—with Bill, Hillary, and Tipper.

In 1997, Hillary's office had 31 major speeches listed on the White House Web site. Two years later, that number had jumped to 86—four times as many as those listed for her husband and Gore combined. She ran White House symposiums on equal pay for women, youth violence, and philanthropy, and she spoke out on a spectrum of domestic and foreign issues, such as foster care for teenagers, gun control, and the plight of refugees in Kosovo. She published 50 "Talking It Over" columns, syndicated in more than 100 newspapers, and she signed a contract to write An Invitation to the White House, a book on entertaining and décor.

With the Hillary and Gore campaigns revving up at the same time, the three-way tensions evident in the White House since 1993 became a more serious problem. "If she runs, we'd wish her well, but we sure could use her help," a top Gore aide had said back in February, when Hillary first publicly signaled her interest in the Senate race. Now Gore's campaign advisers began to worry that Hillary's candidacy would actually have an adverse effect on their candidate. "The implications for Gore are very serious," said New York's former Democratic governor Mario Cuomo. "She has to think very hard on this issue." Not only was Hillary unavailable as a campaigner, she was poaching top Democratic fund-raisers and donors who would normally concentrate on the vice president. She had already enlisted Syracuse native Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party's biggest rainmaker, who in the months to come cast a nationwide fund-raising net for her.

A Nasty Range War

Before Hillary officially established her exploratory committee, she began directly competing with the vice president for money, sometimes even at his own fund-raising events. When Tipper's friend Melinda Blinken and a group of women planned a Gore fund-raiser in Los Angeles, Hillary insisted on being invited—over the objections of the event's organizers. Hillary then shocked the vice president's supporters by soliciting donations for herself in front of Tipper.

At a White House reception in late July for the winners of the Women's World Cup soccer championship, Hillary singled out "my dear friend Tipper Gore" as "a great athlete in her time." But by then Hillary had privately frozen out Tipper, who had given her steadfast support during the Lewinsky ordeal. Hillary never made clear her reasons for the snub, which became apparent once she started running for the Senate. Tipper was reported to be stunned, believing she had been cast aside because she was no longer useful.

Bill headlined four Gore fund-raisers in August and September, two of them on the same night at Washington's Hay-Adams hotel. He called Gore "the single most influential, effective, powerful, and important vice president" in history but did no more events for his vice president for the rest of the year. Bill later complained that his efforts—giving Gore "high profile assignments" over the years, "making sure he received public recognition"—had been unappreciated, especially when he read suggestions that he could "cost Al the election" by associating with him. Bill recalled telling Gore in the fall of 1999 that he would "stand on the doorstep of the Washington Post's headquarters and let him lash me with a bullwhip" if it would help his campaign. The story, according to one member of the Gore team, was a "form of self-pity, his way of calling Gore an ungrateful bastard."

For all his praise of Al Gore in scores of speeches, Bill's behavior throughout 2000—making passive-aggressive remarks, belittling Gore in private, grabbing the spotlight with his own political star turns, and continuing to argue his innocence in various scandals—betrayed ambivalence about a Gore victory, at least one earned on the vice president's own terms. "Clinton felt it was really important for Gore to succeed him to burnish his legacy," said a top White House official. "That was the main reason, and by that logic it was difficult for Clinton to contemplate any campaign strategy that departed from him as the center of attention. He couldn't live with that."

Bill's personal agendas created complications for Gore that grew worse over time and led to a nasty range war between the Clinton White House and the Gore campaign. The tensions centered on the Lewinsky scandal and Bill's past womanizing, which Gore and his advisers believed had alienated independent voters—especially the soccer moms, who stood for traditional values. "Gore was quite offended in terms of personal morality and also political stupidity," said one of Hillary's advisers. Bruce Reed understood that "the vice president would be disappointed by and resentful of the president's mistakes. The way it played out in the campaign was the real damage in how much it threw Gore off his game." As a result, Gore veered too far in differentiating himself from Bill and his record and had difficulty taking advantage of the Clinton administration's legitimate successes.

To avoid associating themselves with the president's excesses, both Gore and Hillary made strategic decisions not to campaign with Bill publicly, even as he campaigned for both of them—considerably more for Hillary than for Gore—at private fund-raising events around the country. Hillary continued to vie with Gore for attention and money and to benefit enormously from Bill's advice as well as from her First Lady perch, while Gore essentially left the White House and played down his relationship with the president. Gore's attentiveness to Bill—especially through their weekly lunches—had kept their governing partnership stable. But during the 2000 campaign they stopped having lunch. In the absence of personal contact their misunderstandings multiplied, and they became, if not estranged from each other, at least disaffected.

To prepare for the formal announcement of her candidacy, Hillary went to the White House on February 4, 2000, for consultations with advisers and practice sessions in the Family Theater. Bill worked closely with her on her announcement speech, the first of many he would edit extensively throughout the campaign. Concerned that Bill might outshine his wife, her consultants gave him no speaking role when she officially entered the race two days later, at the State University of New York in Purchase. As the president stood silently back, Senator Moynihan introduced Hillary, declaring that Eleanor Roosevelt "would love you." Hillary's speech was heavy on issues and light on political ingratiation. She delivered it without the ease Bill had been coaching her to display.

After slogging away on the campaign trail, Hillary learned to appreciate even more her husband's political talents. "Over and over she would say, 'My God, Bill made it look so easy,'" said one of her senior advisers. Hillary recognized that Bill had physical and temperamental qualities—among them a significantly higher energy level—that she could never match. "It helps to be a big man," Hillary observed. "Bill is supernatural. Bill can work a crowd. He can stretch his arm out three or four people deep." At five feet four, Hillary knew she was at a disadvantage.

Hillary's rather joyless politicking was belied by her girlish campaign slogan, "hillary!" Besides creating the illusion of liveliness in an otherwise colorless campaign, the punchy catchword severed the candidate from the Clinton name and became the latest version of an evolving political brand that began with "Hillary Rodham" during Bill's first term as governor, shifted to "Hillary Clinton" to placate an Arkansas electorate irked by her feminism, and then to "Hillary Rodham Clinton" as First Lady.

Bill was remarkably philosophical and compliant about his diminished place in her political identity. "Trashing me is fine if it helps Hillary," Bill told aide Sidney Blumenthal, who observed, "He just wanted her to win."

Following a state dinner on June 20, 2000, honoring Mohammed VI, the new King of Morocco, Bill invited documentary-film maker Ken Burns to stay overnight at the White House. Hillary was exhausted and turned in at midnight, along with the other guests, but Bill insisted that Burns stay up and keep him company. The president, said Burns, "called the election. He knew the combination of political baggage and of Al Gore's need to distance himself from that and create his own legacy, and that that would be a drag.… There was a completely clear-eyed understanding of the failings that had affected his own life and the electoral chances of Al Gore. There was also a concern about his legacy. Bill Clinton was more forward-looking than one would expect at this twilight moment. He was making plans, talking about the book he would write, about where the country should go."

Bill's Priorities

Hillary caught a lucky break when Rudy Giuliani's campaign for the same Senate seat imploded even before he officially announced his candidacy. Late in April, Giuliani revealed that he needed treatment for prostate cancer, and soon tabloid reports were linking him to an attractive brunette named Judith Nathan. In mid-May, Giuliani said that he and his wife were separating, and on May 19 the mayor withdrew from the race.

Taking Giuliani's place was 42-year-old Rick Lazio, a four-term U.S. representative from Long Island who called himself a "mainstream Republican." Lazio instantly accused Hillary of having "no real rationale for serving here other than as a stepping-stone to some other position.… Her ambition is the issue." But, for all his bluster, Lazio was not in Hillary's league.

Between April and November 2000, Bill raised more than $5 million for Hillary at 34 events designated for her Senate race, half of which she actually attended. Variously calling himself "surrogate in chief," "cheerleader in chief," and "spouse in chief," he unabashedly solicited contributions, even when Hillary wasn't the headliner. At a dinner for Democratic congressional candidates in Brentwood, California, he said, "A lot of you have given to Hillary. If you haven't, I hope you will."

The Clintons had made a great effort during the 1996 campaign and afterward to minimize Hillary's co-presidential role, but now Bill was spinning a different story of her "breathtaking range" of activities in domestic and foreign policy, which included a "significant contribution to the Irish peace process." But he declined to touch on her back-channel operations and pervasive influence over personnel, notably her deep involvement in the political vetting of candidates for the federal bench and U.S.-attorney positions.

The president so immersed himself in Hillary's campaign that it became an extension of himself. In some ways, their relationship had come to resemble a co-dependency more than a co-presidency. Not surprisingly, Bill and Hillary remained in harmony over the issues. But he also believed that his enemies had "transferred all their anger to her now." As he told a group of supporters in Miami, "I think half of them think it's their last chance at me."

During his all-night conversation with Ken Burns in June, Bill "spoke movingly of the Democratic National Convention that was coming," Burns recalled, "and how because he was on the backside of scandal and impeachment he had a more delicate role to play." In the intervening months, the president cast those sensible thoughts aside. While Ronald Reagan had addressed a cheering G.O.P. convention in 1988, he quickly stepped into the wings in deference to his vice president's candidacy. But Bill Clinton couldn't resist occupying center stage and grabbing the limelight from Al Gore during a crucial moment in his presidential campaign.

Four days before the convention opened, in Los Angeles, on Monday, August 14, Bill made headlines by engaging in a soul-baring conversation with the Reverend Bill Hybels, one of his spiritual counselors. In front of an audience of 4,500 in Hybels's suburban-Chicago church, the president revisited his experiences as a "sinner" at a moment when Al Gore least needed such a reminder. Bill once again insisted that he had sufficiently apologized for his "terrible mistake," allowed that he had "nothing left to hide," and said, "I'm now in the second year of a process of trying to totally rebuild my life."

The Clintons planned three days in California as an extravaganza of media appearances and fund-raising. En route to Los Angeles on Air Force One on Friday, Bill set the stage by giving a wide-ranging interview to Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times, and Hillary blocked out time on Saturday in her suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York to speak with reporters from the major newspapers, most prominently The New York Times, for publication in the widely read Sunday editions. Both Clintons were lined up for interviews on Saturday afternoon with Bryant Gumbel, of CBS's Early Show, to be broadcast Monday morning, when they were also due to appear on NBC's Today show and ABC's Good Morning America. But after the session with Hybels, the Gore camp asked Bill and Hillary to stand down. "We knew Thursday night how upset the Gore folks were with Clinton's confessional on Thursday, and that would be the talk of our interview," said Lyne Pitts, executive producer of The Early Show. The Clintons bailed out of all the morning shows, although Hillary proceeded as planned with interviews on the three network newscasts Monday night.

A more serious conflict arose from the schedule of events in which Bill and Hillary raised millions for themselves, distracting attention from the presidential race, siphoning off Democratic money, and further angering the vice president and his team. That Saturday night, the Clintons collected $1.1 million for Hillary's war chest from the Gala Salute to President William Jefferson Clinton at the $30 million Mandeville Canyon estate of radio mogul Ken Roberts. Guests paid $1,000 per ticket for a concert, and dinner with the Clintons afterward cost $25,000 per couple. The evening featured a Hollywood Who's Who that included Shirley MacLaine and Whoopi Goldberg. For the concert, the entire Clinton clan—Chelsea, Bill's stepfather and brother, and Hillary's mother and two brothers—was seated with Bill and Hillary in director's chairs labeled with the date and name of the event. Bill was in an exuberant mood, singing along with Diana Ross, Cher, and Melissa Etheridge. At the dinner, Hillary spoke first, followed by Bill, who closed by saying, "I'm not going anywhere except to a different line of work."

On Sunday, the Clintons presided over two events: a reception for Hillary at Sony Pictures Studios and a luncheon at the home of Barbra Streisand to raise money for Bill's presidential library. With a price tag of $125 million and a design meant to evoke a "bridge to the 21st century," the library, on 27 acres along the Arkansas River in Little Rock, posed yet another diversion for prospective Democratic donors to the Gore campaign. Since early 1998, Bill had been quietly soliciting funds from his most loyal and well-heeled allies, a list that the White House kept private. Even during his "lost year," when he was overwhelmed by the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment proceedings, he managed to take in $3 million, and by his final year in office he had picked up the pace, raising tens of millions from such stalwarts as Steven Spielberg; S. Daniel Abraham, the founder of Slim-Fast Foods; and Vinod Gupta, the owner of a computer-database company, who pledged $1 million.

The climax for the Clintons occurred on the first day of the convention, when each gave a prime-time address—carried by the television networks—to the convention delegates. After Hillary finished her 18-minute speech, the cameras cut away to the president making his way through the corridors of the Staples Center as facts and figures (22 million new jobs, 100,000 new police on the streets) were superimposed on the TV screen to celebrate his record. The cameras shot him from behind as he entered the convention center and greeted the rapturous crowd. Commentators instantly likened the moment to Russell Crowe's confident walk into the arena in Gladiator.

Al's Inheritance

While Al Gore was a seasoned campaigner with plenty of hands-on experience, the press portrayed him as an egghead preoccupied by abstractions and, in his own words, "one of the most introverted people in public life." His opponent, George W. Bush, was untested and often incurious, but he had a snappy style and a reputation as a bipartisan deal-maker. With a wink and a smile, the Texas governor promised generous tax cuts and portrayed Gore's neo-populism as a return to big-government Democratic liberalism. During the three presidential debates in October, Gore came across as patronizing and ponderous. Political commentators and television satirists had a field day mocking his exasperated sighing over Bush's simplistic or inarticulate statements. Liberal columnist Molly Ivins remarked, "George W. Bush sounds like English is his second language, and Al Gore sounds like he thinks it's yours."

Gore had particular difficulty dealing with Bush's efforts to cast doubt on his integrity by constantly referring to the "Clinton-Gore" administration, which implicitly linked him to the president's scandals. Even Gore's choice of Joe Lieberman—a stern critic of Bill's conduct with Lewinsky—as his running mate couldn't dispel what political consultant Carter Eskew later called "the elephant in the living room." Bill refused to acknowledge that his behavior was a factor in the campaign. "I never believed that the American people were going to, in effect, vote against their own interests and their own values by holding Al Gore responsible for a personal mistake I made," Bill told Ron Brownstein before the convention.

In any number of ways, the Gore campaign found itself in a contest with Hillary's campaign. One of the most dramatic examples occurred in September as the Federal Trade Commission prepared to release a report on violence in the media. The agency's million-dollar study showed that entertainment companies were marketing violent movies, video games, and music to children under 18. Under ordinary circumstances, a vice president running for the presidency would have first call on publicizing the report. But Hillary insisted she should handle the rollout because she had already called for a universal ratings system. "It was a key point of her Senate campaign," said Bruce Reed. "The president had singled her out for that in the 2000 State of the Union, so the finding of the F.T.C. was directly relevant to her campaign. The vice president's campaign had concluded that cultural issues were hurting him, and they were dying to announce the report as well."

After "several painful days of negotiations," administration officials "thought we had a resolution that served everyone," said Reed. The F.T.C. would release the report on Monday, September 11, followed by a comment from Gore, and then a separate one from the Clintons at a campaign event in New York. This strategy did not sit well with Gore and Lieberman, who decided to break the news on their own by inviting a reporter from The New York Times to the vice president's residence on Sunday for an interview to be published Monday. "Every day was like that," Reed said. "It was a typical example of how people who had known and trusted each other a long time would do things they otherwise wouldn't have done."

Bill and Hillary offered their comments on Monday morning at a Jewish community center in Scarsdale, New York. "Everything that needs to be said has been said," Bill told the audience. "But what does it all mean? How can we distill it?" He then explained why Hillary understood the issue better than anyone—presumably including Gore. "She started working on it years ago," he said, describing the significance of a "uniform unambiguous rating system" that "Hillary … was the first and maybe the only person to forcefully advocate in the entire country."

Hillary also continued to compete with Gore for campaign funds. By late September, she had gathered more than $22 million (compared to Rick Lazio's $15.7 million) from a surprisingly large national base of donors. Sixty percent of her money came from donors outside of New York State, including 16 percent from California alone. Charles Schumer, who ran a much tighter race against incumbent Al D'Amato in 1998, raised only 25 percent of his funds from out-of-state donors, 4 percent of them from California.

Hillary's campaign by then was sprinting toward what looked to be an effortless victory. Her surge began after her debate with Lazio on September 13 in Buffalo, with NBC's Tim Russert as a no-nonsense moderator. She was on her own that night, with Bill in Washington, watching in the Residence. He was "a nervous wreck," he later said. Lazio hit Hillary hard, and she punched back. In a New York Times survey conducted in the days following the debate, 48 percent of the respondents favored Hillary and 39 percent Lazio. The newspaper's previous poll, in June, had shown her only five points ahead. An even more telling number was her support from the much-coveted suburban women, who had backed Lazio 43 to 36 in June and now went for Hillary 54 to 38. "She did great in the debate … even though it was two on one half the time" (a slap at both Lazio and Russert), Bill told a crowd of financial backers in Philadelphia four days later. "I thought she did best when they got meanest, and that's good.… She showed … she could take a punch, and she can take a lot of them." At a 53rd-birthday fund-raiser for Hillary at Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom, Bill proudly announced that she had the "requisite aggression" to be a good New Yorker.

Bill continued to express frustration that he couldn't publicly participate in the presidential campaign as much as he wanted. "I wish I were running this year," he told Sidney Blumenthal. "I'd run their ass down." He disapproved of Gore's populist rhetoric and felt his own leadership wasn't getting enough credit for the country's progress. He sent advice through emissaries to William Daley, Gore's campaign chairman, as well as to campaign manager Donna Brazile. "I believe Clinton used practically everyone he could get his hands on to send messages to Al Gore," said Brazile.

But Bill also kept making counterproductive comments about the candidate, his message, and his tactics, some of which surfaced in the press. He might voice subtle misgivings, as in a speech in Connecticut when he said, "People ask me: Do you really think Al Gore is going to win? I always said yes." Or he could veer off message, as when he casually said at one fund-raiser, "Suppose Al Gore turns out to be wrong because there's a little bit of a recession, and we don't have enough money to keep all the spending commitments?" His criticisms made headlines after the third presidential debate, on October 17, when Bill was reported to have told congressional Democrats that he had "almost gagged" over Gore's failure to challenge Bush's false claim of credit for a patients' bill of rights in Texas. Gore strategist Tad Devine told Steve Richetti, Bill's deputy chief of staff, that the comment had helped raise Gore's unfavorable rating by five points in a week. "The president goes out and awakens doubts about Gore, and all the bad stuff … begins to come to the surface," said Devine.

At the end of the month, only days before the polls opened, a new issue of Esquire appeared on the newsstands with Bill on the cover, striking a decidedly unpresidential pose: legs spread wide, huge hands clapped on his knees, his expression radiating self-satisfaction. In the magazine's "Exit Interview," Bill mentioned Al Gore just twice in passing, defended himself against the controversies of his presidency, castigated his critics, and said the Republicans owed him an apology. The effect was to make the campaign seem all about Bill—exactly what Gore was trying to avoid.

The colliding agendas of the president, First Lady, and vice president were gifts to the Republicans, whose efforts to tag Gore with his boss's weaknesses were paying off. "Gore's numbers on honesty and forthrightness lag far behind Bush's," Newsweek noted the week before the election. There were other disturbing signs in the closing days as the press began to comment that the economy was "slowing, not yet ominously but noticeably." Third-party candidate Ralph Nader was also emerging as a spoiler on the left with a "noticeable little breeze at his back." Nader, who appealed to roughly 5 percent of voters, was gaining traction by portraying Gore and Bush as indistinguishable, and the Gore campaign worried that he could have an adverse impact on the returns in a half-dozen states.

After negotiations between the White House and the Gore campaign, Bill was dispatched to do eleventh-hour politicking in only three states—speeches at the convention centers in Little Rock and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and get-out-the-vote rallies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. He worked at full throttle in New York State, a safe haven where his popularity was at 70 percent, where Democrats had two million more registered voters than Republicans, and where he could keep helping his wife with his public appearances.

Election Night

Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea went to the polls at the Douglas G. Grafflin elementary school, in Chappaqua, on Tuesday morning, November 7, a mild and intermittently cloudy day. When he had first pulled the lever for his wife, two months earlier, in the pro forma Democratic primary, Bill had called it a "most extraordinary experience.… I was as happy as a kid on Christmas morning." Now he and Chelsea cast their ballots first, then embraced while Hillary voted for herself.

In the evening, Marine One ferried them to Manhattan, where they had a suite of rooms at the Grand Hyatt hotel, next to Grand Central Terminal. En route, Hillary busied herself by reading The New York Times while Bill edited the victory speech that she was too anxious to review. In the suite swarming with staff, Hillary wore a terry-cloth hotel bathrobe as a stylist worked on her hair. At 10:40, Lazio called to concede, and Hillary "simply smiled" before giving everyone hugs. She had won resoundingly, with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio's 43 percent.

Al Gore's fate that night was cruelly ambiguous. He was headed toward winning the overall total by more than a half-million votes (543,895, when all the counting was eventually completed). Earlier in the evening, he had also seemed poised for victory in the decisive Electoral College as the TV networks gave him Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. But around 10 p.m., the Florida results turned uncertain, and the state switched back into the undecided category. By around two a.m., all the networks declared that Bush had prevailed in Florida, giving him the 25 electoral votes he needed to win the presidency.

Gore stoically called Bush to concede, and was driven through the rain to Nashville's War Memorial Plaza to make his concession speech. As he was about to walk onto the platform, his aides grabbed him and said that Bush's five-figure lead had shrunk to some 500 votes. Under election law, Gore was entitled to a recount if the margin was less than one-half of 1 percent. Gore called Bush back and said, "Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you. The state of Florida is too close to call." The vice president's words triggered a legal challenge that was to drag on for 36 days.

In the Grand Hyatt, Bill was transfixed by the developing drama. He had spent the evening prowling the suite, consulting with advisers, making phone calls, and planting himself only inches from one of the living room's four TV sets. An aide thought that "he seemed to be having fun … as if he was watching a close and important basketball game." At 4:18 a.m., Bill reached Gore, later reporting that the vice president had been "in a good humor, pleased that he was ahead in the popular vote." Gore congratulated Hillary, and "they had a nice little visit." Bill stayed up the rest of the night, playing Oh Hell with members of his staff before finally going to sleep at six a.m.

"Election Night was so bizarre, mostly bitter," Bruce Reed recalled. "It was clear from almost the moment she got in the race that the First Lady would win and that the vice president's camp was star-crossed from the outset. There wasn't anybody at the White House who felt much like celebrating. We were over the moon for Hillary's victory, but the prize lost was so consequential and painful that it dwarfed everything."

For more than a month, Al Gore suffered in political purgatory as his lawyers battled the Bush forces in Florida over the convoluted recount to determine the winner of the state's electoral votes. Those tense weeks also brought postmortems and recriminations over Gore's failure to easily capture the Electoral College. His popular vote was 50,999,897, exceeded only by Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide. Even though he had received far more votes and a higher percentage than Bill Clinton had in his two presidential races, Gore found himself battling accusations from the Clinton camp that if the president had been unleashed on the campaign trail he would have energized the Democratic base and enabled Gore to win.

The Gore-Lieberman ticket found itself on the wrong side of the classic pendulum of American politics. In 1992, the momentum was beginning to swing toward the Democrats after 12 years of G.O.P. control of the White House, and Ross Perot helped by taking the vast majority of his votes from George H. W. Bush. But by 2000 the pendulum was moving in the other direction, propelled by the Clinton scandals, which had alienated religious and swing voters. Former White House aide and Gore campaign consultant Robert Boorstin told Vanity Fair's Marjorie Williams, "Did we make mistakes? Yes. Would I say that Clinton was the only reason we lost? No. Would I say with absolute zero doubt in my mind that we would have won the election if Clinton hadn't put his penis in [Lewinsky's] mouth? Yes. I guarantee it."

A veneer of public graciousness between the president and vice president concealed their intensifying private anger over each other's role in the electoral outcome. At Gore's request, they met in the Oval Office on Thursday, December 21, to air their differences. It was an unpleasant encounter, as Gore forthrightly blamed Bill's scandals, while Bill rebuked Gore for failing to make the most of their successful record. Afterward, Bill told Sidney Blumenthal they had parted after "patching everything up," but in fact the mutual resentments among the Clintons and Gores persisted.

Gore's defeat helped set the stage for Hillary's own presidential campaign. As irony would have it, he had to preside over her swearing-in at the Capitol, and then, four days later, he gamely re-enacted her oath-of-office ceremony in front of what The Washington Post described as nearly 3,000 "swinging, swaying, celebrity-studded" Hillary supporters in Madison Square Garden. His final political act was supervising the official count of the Electoral College vote, a painful ordeal that brought an end to his quest for the presidency.